Russell County occupies land that once lay at the heart of the Creek Nation and included several important Creek towns that figured prominently in the Creek and Seminole Wars era and the saga of Removal. Chehaw, a Hitchiti-speaking town whose name roughly means "high place," was originally on a bluff above the Chattahoochee River and is believed to have moved near Uchee Creek by the time of the Second Creek War; it was one of the more important towns in the Creek Nation, a focus of early European traders because of its influence over neighboring towns, and a place regularly visited by British officials since the early 1700s. Benjamin Hawkins described Chehaw as home to more than 200 families with thriving farms, herds of cattle, horses, and hogs, and large crops of corn, rice, and potatoes. Nearby Ooseoochee was closely connected to Chehaw, and the two towns shared thousands of acres of rich farmland along the Chattahoochee and worked together in negotiating trade agreements with the British in the eighteenth century; the modern community of Oswichee probably takes its name from Ooseoochee. Yuchi Town was among the largest and most important towns in the Creek Nation; the Yuchi had migrated to the Chattahoochee valley from what is now Tennessee during the upheaval of the Yamassee War, first settling in Georgia before moving west into what is now Alabama. Though they were trading and diplomatic partners of their Creek neighbors, the Yuchi spoke a unique language unrelated to other area groups and maintained distinct traditions; Yuchi Town was home to several hundred families and remained in the same general location from the early 1700s until the early 1800s, and its descendants maintain active ceremonial grounds in Oklahoma today. Uchee Creek is named for the Yuchi. In what is now western Russell County, Watoolahawka likely took its name from whooping cranes on the creek where it stood; although its age at the time of the Second Creek War is unclear, it had become a prominent community by the 1830s because of its position along the road connecting Columbus and Tuskegee, and it was home to the longtime Creek leader Neah Micco, who played a major role in opposition to Removal. High Log, a Yuchi settlement on Hatcheechubbee Creek in southwestern Russell County, was likely a branch village of Yuchi Town; its name may have come from a corruption of "Hogologee," a Georgia location where some Yuchis had settled after the Yamassee War, or from an English translation of a Muscogee word for "high bridge." Only a few years old at the time of the Second Creek War, High Log was one of the seats of rebel Creek resistance, and many Yuchis fled to Florida during the war to escape removal. Apalachicola, on a high bluff above the Chattahoochee River, had been settled as early as the 1600s by Hitchiti-speaking Creeks; a nearby Spanish military outpost built in 1689 was called Fort Apalachicola. The town moved about a mile upriver in the mid-1700s, but the surrounding area remained populated by the Apalachicola people well into the nineteenth century, and some later migrated into north Florida.